The present invention relates to an information distribution system and an information distribution method for distributing contents such as video images, music, and the like, to a data terminal through a network.
In recent years, because of the wide spread of networks such as the Internet, it has been possible to easily access distribution sites which are distributing video images, music, and the like from a data terminal such as a personal computer, so as to receive desired music and video image to be played right there on the data terminal of a client side, by way of stream distribution, or by acquiring them by downloading.
For example, when a user would like to listen to music, the user accesses a homepage of a music distribution site and inputs a title of a music piece to which the user would like to listen, for example, thereby a plurality of music titles of music pieces corresponding to the title will be displayed for each musician. In this case, if the user pushes an audition button for the music piece of the musician to whom the user would like to listen, an audition music piece will be provided by way of the streaming distribution through the Internet from the distribution site to a user's terminal, and will be played for approximately 30 seconds, for example. As the result of the audition, if the user wants to listen to the music piece completely, the user pushes a listening button, then the downloading of whole this music piece will start. If the user waits for one or two minutes for completely downloading the music piece, although depending on a line speed and a capacity of the whole music piece, then the play back of the body data will be started.
However, if it requires somewhat waiting time to start to play the body data as described above, a user's interest in listening music will be spoiled, and this may be a factor causing a listener to change his or her mind such as to listen to only one piece of music. On this account, the listener will give up listening to other pieces of music, although the listener is intended to listen to several music pieces at first. In order to avoid this situation, there is a method of removing such user's waiting time and playing music smoothly, wherein the header segments of the music pieces (programs) are downloaded, in advance, so as to start to play the header segments immediately after the listening button is pushed, then the completely downloaded body data are played subsequently. See, for example, Japanese Laid-open Patent No. 2002-91863.
However, in the above-mentioned method where the waiting time is removed by downloading the header segments of the programs beforehand as described above, the method has not provide actual services, because it does not describe which program header segment should be downloaded, in advance, and a method required for selecting a particular program in that case.
Further, in television broadcasting system, there are dedicated reception terminals, such as TiVo and RePlay, having a hard disk recording function, and a function to exchange viewing logs etc. with a server side. These are recording services which recognizes user's preferences based on user's program evaluations and viewing log, and automatically records programs which are agreed with the user's preferences among broadcasting programs. However, it is difficult to perfectly recognize the user's preferences, and chances of timely encountering the time when the contents agreed with the user's preferences are being broadcasted are also limited. In contrast, when downloading the contents via a network, there are chances of acquiring a lot of contents which the user feels that they are infinite number of contents and do not need to think about downloading timing. However, it is not easy to locate preferred video images or music contents from these infinite number of contents. Even if the waiting time to start to play the distributed audition piece is reduced to several seconds, it takes considerable waiting time in total to audit an immense number of audition pieces, so that it is not possible to efficiently distribute video images or music contents.